Please Do Not Adjust Your Settings. Cantha Really Looks Like That.

MagiWasTaken has a post up called "Don't you ever run out of topics?". The answer is a very simple "No" although he still manages to get a couple of thousand words out of it. 

He's on an unbroken posting streak going back four hundred and forty two days. Wilhelm mentioned recently that he's posted for seven hundred days straight. I'm waaaaay behind both of them on my current daily run, which stands as of today at two hundred and twenty seven days of posting without a break.

So, have I run out of topics? Or ideas? Or energy? 

Nope! I have, however, run out of time to write anything of either significant length or meaningful content because yet again I spent the entire day playing Guild Wars 2. I got away with it yesterday because I just hammered out a quick precis of what I'd done and pretended there was some purpose to it.

I'd be perfectly willing to pull the same trick again if I thought I could get away with it but unfortunately (as far as the blog goes) I did almost exactly the same today as I did yesterday, minus the big meta event, which wasn't being done on the map I was on, or I would have done that, too. I think I'd be pushing my luck if I tried to spin another day spent peering at maps trying to find elusive points of interest, peppering golems with an arrow cart or sorting bags on four or five more characters into anything anyone would even pretend to find worth reading.

I could always fall back on what's become an old favorite (Of mine, that is. Not of anyone else's, I'm sure.) and pretend this is my own pirate radio station. (I suppose, with the internet being what it is, I could actually have my own pirate radio station... there's a thought...) but that would make for the third music post in just over a week, which seems a little much even to me, especially since I also did a TV post the day before yesterday.

That leaves one obvious choice. It's quick, it's easy and it's all about mmorpgs so it's inarguably On Topic. Yes, it's time for a screenshot post!

And you know what, I've even thought of a peg to hang it on. Honestly, this isn't just a bunch of random snaps I took while I was playing!

Here's the thing. No matter how much I complain about ArenaNet and Guild Wars 2 at times, I have never been anything but highly complimentary about the art team. Every time I review any content drop, no matter how I moan about it being short or tedious or badly-written, I always end up saying something like this:

"The ANet art team knocked it out of the park again. We expect it but even by their standards this is gorgeous work."

That's what I said about End of Dragons in my first impressions post. At the time I believed it was an uncontroversial, indeed most likely an uncontested opinion. 

I was wrong. I was looking for something on the official GW2 forum the other day when I came across several threads complaining about oversaturated colors. Someone (In a thread I now, of course, can't find.) even went so far as to claim that the graphics in the original game as it launched nearly ten years ago were significantly better than they are now - and they posted some very convincing evidence in the form of screenshots to prove it, too.

After that, I started looking at the Canthan maps with a more analytical eye and I have to say I can see what people are complaining about. I hadn't really noticed because I'm a huge fan of saturated color, as must be obvious from the distorted images I churn out as headers for music posts here. If you're not, then yes, there's a problem.

Once you look closely at the scenery in the new maps, it does have a flatter, less detailed quality than the much older maps. The lighting effects are definitely not as realistic. And the colors are turned up well beyond eleven.

If you value naturalism and subtlety in your fantasy art, I guess the game hasn't necessarily been following the ideal trajectory all these years. The brush strokes have been getting broader, metaphorically speaking. 

If it's spectacle and showmanship you're after, though, the whole shebang just keeps getting bigger and brighter. And louder. Where the art used to croon, now it shouts.

There are plenty of subtle touches if you look for them but it is more a case of finding a quiet spot. Back in 2015 I was able to post an elegy for Ascalon supported almost entirely by images of calm, reflective serenity. The colors are muted autumnal browns, yellows and greys. Try something like that in Cantha and you'd need to use filters. Or wear sunglasses.

Even though I don't necessarily agree with the players who find Cantha garish, brash and even badly rendered, it was instructive to be reminded of what the game used to look like. Something has changed and I hadn't even realised. 

I'm not even sure whether I prefer the old art to the new. It is brasher but it arguably punches harder.

The nice thing is, I don't have to choose. Ascalon is still there whenever I want to go walking in the woods in the mellow afternoon sunshine but now I have a whole hyperactive meta-landscape to romp around, too.

And hey, I can get blog posts out of both of them, so I'm not complaining.

Bandwagonesque : WoW

It feels slightly strange being a Battle for Azeroth refusenik right now. I never planned to buy WoW's latest expansion but I had been intending to re-subscribe for the pre-launch run-up. I thought I'd play during July and August. It would have given me something else to write about for Blaugust and I thought it might be amusing, be working my way through Legion when everyone else was in BfA.

In the event, the lead-up just didn't seem interesting enough to justify jumping the train. I still hadn't pulled  the trigger, when both GW2 and EQ2 dropped extremely effective spoilers. The Festival of the Four Winds and Return to Guk caught my fancy and I couldn't see any way I'd be able to find enough time to log into World of Warcraft often enough over the summer to justify even the minimal cost of a couple of months' subscription.

It's particularly unsettling, then, that I'm finding some of the reports and screenshots coming out of the new expansion to be more appealing than anything I've seen from WoW for years. The look and theme of the new continent (?) seems to be the closest WoW's come to the kind of classic MMORPG high fantasy on which the game was built since Wrath of the Lich King.

Classic high fantasy is really where my MMO heart lies. I came to EverQuest twenty years ago looking for it and all the MMOs I've most enjoyed in the ensuing years (EQ2, Vanguard, Rubies of Eventide, GW2, City of Steam) have had something of that hinterland. I'm all for bolting on some magitech, science fantasy and steampunk trappings but what I want most are cobbled streets, tiled roofs, wooden ships and scenery that wouldn't be out of place in a touring production of A Winter's Tale.

Call that a city?

 Boralus, the coastal capital of Kul Tiras, looks nigh-on perfect. Unlike Syp I love huge, sprawling cities. I don't mind getting lost in a maze of streets that wind and twist and leave me baffled. I always thought Stormwind was a pretty decent-sized city so to hear Boralus described as "the first WoW city that feels like it's really sprawling" makes me want to go see it for myself.

I'm also a major fan of the autumnal, in games and in real life. I've waxed poetical often enough about the eternal autumn of Ascalon in GW2. When Syp talks of "...an autumnal feel for Boralus, which plays well with both the sea and mountains around it. Definitely a city for pumpkin spice lattes, yoga pants, and unnecessary scarves" I fond myself thinking "that's my kind of town". Minus the yoga pants, of course.

So, much to my surprise, I find myself almost wishing I was there, experiencing all this first -hand along with every one else, not just reading about it in blog posts. Especially this one. I want Dolly and Dot to be my best friends too.

None of which gives me any more time to play. If I did buy BfA right now I strongly suspect it would suffer the exact same fate as Legion, which has remained unplayed since I got it for my birthday nearly two years ago.

I wonder if I could stow away?

What's more, I have just bought a new MMORPG. Not for actual cash, you understand. I finally decided to use the Steam credit Chestnut sent me for winning the draw at the end of last  year's IntPiPoMo. I bought Bless.

I had it in my wishlist. More accurately, it was my wishlist. (My Steam wishlist is now Unavowed, thanks to Jeromai and xyzzysqrl). Bless dropped to 67% off so I got it. Mostly because of this post from The MMOist. Any MMO that lets you make non-human characters has to be investigated. Plus I'm itching to level a new character in a fresh environment, something I don't seem to have done for months.

Before I can, I have to make space for a 55GB download. That's going to take some re-organization. Maybe even a new HDD.

All things considered it would be a crazy move to buy Battle for Azeroth right now. I think I'm going to put it on my birthday list. Maybe I'll even get around to playing it before the next WoW expansion comes out.

Why We Fight: GW2

Today my cat and I went walking.

It was another lovely day. The sun was warm. The water cool.

 We sat together for a while.

After, as we walked on, he said, "Everything is so beautiful. Why must we fight the dragons? Why can't we just play and fish and sleep in the sun?".

"Oh, Charlie", I said, "You are such a cat!"

And then I took him to The Brand.


So he would understand.

Traits And Megaservers Reconsidered : GW2

What with The Tourney, Boss Blitz and Bazaar of the Four Winds, the project to find out what leveling up feels like now we have Megaservers and a new trait system fell somewhat into abeyance these last couple of weeks. Before that, my Charr Guardian cruised through Ascalon in short order, completing Plains of Ashford, Diessa Plateau, Filed of Ruin and Blazeridge Steppes before finally topping out in the upper fifties while finishing one of my favorite maps, Iron Marches.

All of that wouldn't have given nearly enough experience so there were some side trips to The Shiverpeaks, where she completed Wayfarer Foothills, Snowden Peaks and Lornar's Pass. More experience trickled in from a few forays into the Borderlands and the odd jolly to visit a World Boss here and there, now and then. Currently she's level 66 and trudging through Fireheart Rise, which, while it has grown on me a lot over the years, still wouldn't make any list I might compile of Places In Tyria You Must See Before You Die.

The whole project has been very instructive. It certainly hasn't turned out as I imagined it might, let alone how I feared. It's not really possible for an experienced player of an MMO to put himself, emotionally, psychologically or pragmatically, in the position of someone who just installed the game for the first time that day but even taking that into account it seems that the hefty changes brought by The Feature Pack have made leveling in GW2 no harder, slower or more tedious than it ever was.

On my travels I have once or twice, no more than that, heard people express the opinion that they were feeling the lack of Traits at lower levels. It's certainly not a topic of conversation that comes up often among the endless rehashing of builds and torrent of "how do I...?" questions that buzz around the ever-busy open chat channels of the Megaserver Maps. At no point so far have I felt either underpowered or restricted in options because of the paucity of trait points. Indeed, it was only as I was writing this and popped into the game to check how many traits my Guardian had that I realized I haven't even spent the last two she received.

Part of the reasoning for doling out Traits so slowly was supposedly to prevent new players from becoming confused and overwhelmed by choice. Even as someone who has never considered Choice to be a Universal Good I was skeptical about that argument. I very much doubt there would have been many players under the original system who threw up their hands in despair when faced with half a dozen options in half a dozen trait lines. That sort of thing tends to go with the territory when you play any kind of RPG, doesn't it?

Just because the old system probably wasn't broken doesn't mean it couldn't be improved, though, and somewhat to my surprise I think the new version is better, at least in some ways. It certainly makes me think much more carefully about which trait to choose and pay much more attention to what they all do than I used to, that's for sure. When you have to decide whether to spend money or do a specific task to open each individual trait it definitely focuses the mind and I've found the experience a lot more entertaining than I expected, in no way the frustrating time or money sink that people (including me) had speculated it might be.

There may be "nice grawl" but there's no such thing as "nice Flame Legion"

It's not all rainbows and roses, though. There are definitely ways it could be and needs to be tightened up. The main drawback remains the rate that traits are unlocked during normal gameplay. It barely happens at all. ANet seem to be aware of this. A recent patch made a good few changes to the detail, reducing over-reliance on Map Completion as a mechanic and increasing the emphasis on killing specific monsters or completing specific events.

It's a start but it doesn't go nearly far enough. After 66 levels, done almost entirely by completing level-appropriate content in the open world, my Guardian has unlocked precisely six traits out of a possible sixty-five (and she bought one of those at the Trainer). I don't think that a system that results in a character having around 90% of her traits still locked when she hits max level can be considered well-tuned.

This is the one I bought. Essential.

The other goal of the exercise was to see how the world felt under the jackboot of the Megaserver. There was a lot of strong feeling about this change when it happened and I was among those who felt strongly. Like most changes it turned out to be less of everything than expected - less of a boon for those that welcomed it and less of a curse for those that dreaded it.

Maps are consistently busier as was intended but maps that don't have a specific, popular mega-event are only busier by comparison to the wastelands they used to be. You certainly won't be trampled by the horde in Iron Marches or Fireheart Rise. Field of Ruin, remarkably, felt even quieter than I remembered it. My concern that the ambiance of the deep wilderness would be lost seems unfounded.

Whatever algorithm they're using to match players with friends/guilds/worlds has arguably improved slightly but my feeling is that there's still some inconsistency baked in that no one quite understands. There was quite an argument in Map chat over it yesterday with some people claiming it worked well for them while others expressed what has been my own experience, that it's at best hit or miss. I generally still have to right-click Mrs Bhagpuss's portrait to get to the same Megaserver Map about fifty percent of the time even when we are grouped. Given that the algorithm isn't managing reliably or consistently to place us together even though we are in the same Guild, on each other's Friends lists, share the same Home World and Language Group and are in the same frickin' Party...well it's not impressing me much.

The Great Jungle Wurm is under there somewhere. And so's my Guardian.

The effect on community has been interesting. I do still see a good few familiar Yak's Bend names around outside WvW and it has an interesting emotional resonance, rather like spotting someone you know in the crowd at a gig. I wonder how much that relies on me having known those names already from the pre-Megaserver days. Would a new player starting now ever even see anyone, outside their guild or WvW, often enough to build up that "know him by sight" kind of relationship? I suspect they might because there are now players from other servers that I vaguely recognize because they turn up at World Bosses at the same times I do.

Unlike the Trait revamp, about which very little now seems to be said, you can still hear people complaining about the Megaserver every day. There's often someone bemoaning its very existence in map chat, cursing its foibles and flaws or wishing for the return of at least one non-Megaserver Map (the consensus would probably be for Lion's Arch). Voices also speak strongly in defense, praising both the convenience and the liveliness it brings to events big and small. I would have expected people to have gotten used to it by now but it seems that it'll take a while longer before we forget how things used to be when we were all off in our own little worlds.

Overall I'd give the Trait Revamp 7/10 and Megaservers 5/10. Neither is as bad an idea as it first might have appeared but both could do with another pass or several with that famous ArenaNet polishing cloth.

Return To Ascalon : GW2

The Guardian is overpowered. There's no two ways about it. When GW2 began I read several accounts by those who'd taken the class as first choice and I was struck by how easy they made their experiences sound. It wasn't as though I was having a hard time with the Ranger but it seemed Guardians were having a softer ride still.

Despite those reports, as I leveled all the classes Guardian was the one I was least looking forward to. It's a paladin of sorts and paladin is a class I've always found worthy but dull. I left it to the end and when I finally got around to it I coupled it with the race I least wanted to play, that Elf-substitute, the Sylvari. That way I'd get two bitter pills down in one swallow.

As I played one up I can't say I warmed much to the Sylvari as a race. I'm fond enough of my single Sylvari character but I don't think I'll ever make another. The Guardian class, though, turned out to be an unexpected pleasure and now, with added Charr, it's gone beyond a pleasure to a joy. There's no ambiguity over how I want to spend my gaming time at the moment.

This is a crucial week in the Season for Yak's Bend, a match we have to win to stay in contention for a top three placing. Bodies on the ground matter, even indifferently skilled ones, and most evenings I manage a few hours in the Borderlands with the only two classes I can play in WvW with any facility - Ranger and Elementalist.

Duty done, the rest of every day's Charr Guardian day. After Diessa we moved on to Snowden Drifts, filled that out, taking her to 25, perfectly poised for Lornar's Pass, which nominally covers 25 to 40. The final point of interest lit up just after she'd dinged 33, by which time she was surrounded by level 39 and 40 mobs.

In common with other MMOs GW2 has a few ways of reminding you that you're running ahead of yourself. The distance at which aggressive creatures begin to pay attention to you increases substantially once they have more than a five level advantage and there's a level-based sliding scale for glancing blows, which reduce your damage by half. Playing a  Guardian solo it was hard to feel engaged with combat unless the creatures we were fighting towered four or five levels above me.

Even that was well inside my comfort zone. The point at which the "challenge" approximates what I remember as normal leveling play in older MMOs like EQ2 or LotRO comes at a very specific point: six levels above your character level. That's when the unmodified chance of Glancing Blows hits 50% and its what I would consider the sweet spot for enjoyable fights that require tactics, concentration and engagement.

It also appears to be the very highest level-differential at which whoever decided on the rules wanted or expected players to operate. Once you cross that six level gap your "chance" of landing a glancing blow becomes a 100% certainty, which isn't much fun and which, I think, we can safely take as a message from the developers that you've pushed your luck too far.

At this point I should make it clear that I'm very much not one of those people who demand "challenge" in everything or who irrevocably links risk with reward. Nor do I necessarily feel MMOs have become too easy to be entertaining. I agree with Wilhelm when he observes that  "the strongest force in the universe is laziness" and I'm generally more than happy to take the low road.

It's not, after all, as if I'm comparing the experience to, say, Everquest, now supposedly a dumbed-down, weak-beer parody of its former self, yet where, in 2014, playing the best solo class in the game, fully dressed in good, level appropriate gear, near-raid-buffed from MGBs and with a mercenary NPC providing heals, I still have to pay full attention to what I'm doing at all times when fighting mobs several levels below me because not to do so would mean a swift death and twenty minutes recovery time. I'm not comparing GW2 with that. That would be silly.


I'm merely observing that it's perhaps an odd quirk of design that places what feels like a natural, comfortable, easy-but-satisfying level of gameplay right at the very upper margin of the range of the feasible. Or perhaps, as I began by suggesting, it's just that Guardians are overpowered.

You might argue that, since GW2 gameplay is built around a core of loose alliances and informal non-grouped group play, content was never designed for or aimed at soloists; that  although for something like 80% of the time the game's been around, most leveling-by-map-exploration has, by necessity, been a solo activity, it's nothing more than an unintended accident of circumstance and one that the Megaserver is here to correct.

You might argue that if it wasn't for the glaringly obvious fact that almost without exception content in GW2 gets easier the more people there are to do it. Oh, granted, it often takes longer. It's always been fastest and most efficient to complete most group events with a handful of people rather than a zerg or a blob. But unless you equate time taken with difficulty rather than just with inefficiency, more people never make things harder.

Then again, perhaps it's down to the post Feature Pack retuning of sub-80 content that was carried out in recompense for the loss of character-power inflicted by the Great Trait Revamp. It's hard to remember, being so long since I last leveled a character, but it does seem easier this time even without those traits.

 

Speaking of Traits, at 30 I was finally able to open the window to see what lay in store. I was curious to see if the same "wait and see" approach would leave higher Traits locked away from view but no, once you hit 30 you can see them all. Of course see them is all you can do. I had one Trait point at 30 and at 33 I still have one Trait point. I get another at 36 and the third at 42. Hard to imagine why anyone thought this could ever be a good idea.

Even though you don't have the points to use them, there's nothing to stop you unlocking the Traits themselves, of course. You can now mouse over to see what they are and where you earn them. For example, I can see that to get the Adept level Trait "Master of Consecrations", which "Reduces recharge on consecration skills and increases their durations", I would need Map Completion for Frostgorge Sound, a level 80 map. Or I could pay 10 silver and two skill points to a trainer, which, if I didn't already have the resources required, might take, oh, five minutes rough and tumble on a map my own level. Hmm. Tough one. What would you do?

Scanning down the list it seems to me that as each trait point is acquired almost everyone will immediately go to their trainer and purchase the one they want right now, because even if someone was flat broke it would almost always be quicker and easier to earn the silver and the skill points than to do the forfeit. Indeed, given that many of the unlocks require map completion, you'd have earned everything you needed to pay the fee almost as soon as you started, so why carry on?

Meanwhile, in the background, as players naturally play through content, odd, random Traits will unlock themselves here and there. I already have "Inner Fire" unlocked, for example, because the requirement for it is Map Completion for Lornar's Pass. In three levels I'll even have the second point I need to open the first Major Trait slot and use it.

In operation, as I anticipated, it's not at all a bad system. It's easy to understand and it gives the player choice in how to access it but it seems extremely unlikely to form any kind of framework for providing self-generated, self-directed gameplay. Not only is the Trainer option clearly faster, easier and cheap but the points accrue so very slowly that there's no incentive whatsoever to go out and open Traits in the first place.

Not a disaster, then, but certainly a missed opportunity. Something easily pushed to the background as one pursues the unchallenging but highly enjoyable task of incrementing that number in the bottom-left corner of the screen. My Guardian is now in Fields of Ruin, feeling very overpowered indeed against the level 30 mobs but glad to be back in the warm Ascalon sunshine after days spent shivering in the snow.

Mind you, being overpowered in level-appropriate content didn't help much on the run through 40-50 zone Blazeridge Steppes. Even though she did make it through with nothing worse than singed whiskers there were some very tense ten hit point moments along the way. Thank Dwaya for Renewed Focus, that's all I can say...

Now Ebonhawke, my second-favorite city in the game, awaits. We've already herded farm animals and torn down posters. We even found the famous Pipe Organ and attempted a tune. It's an adventurer's life for sure. Overpowered she may be, or the content undertuned, whichever it is, but there's entertainment yet to be had and plenty of it. If current parameters hold, Map Completion of Ascalon should come somewhere around level 65. For a Charr that's all the incentive required.

This Is No Time To Stop And Smell The Flowers : GW2

Ascalon is my favorite region of Tyria. Plains of Ashford and Diessa Plateau were the maps where I began my long love-affair with GW2 all the way back in beta and their power to charm hasn't faded though the crowds that used to fill them have. Over the long drift down from launch I've become used to roaming the burnished fields, brittle and golden in the eternal Ascalonian summer's end, alone.

Well, those days are over. The Megaserver's here and with it the crowds are back. Diessa even has some kind of Champ Train running - Nageling Giant, Spider, Seperatist Agitator, Wurm. I'm learning the names if not the rotation. The reports of the Death of the Champ Train turned out to be greatly exaggerated, by the way. Rumor has it most zones have one now.

There was a line for the Breached Wall vista, one of the hardest vistas in the game. I had to stop twice and wait for some Norns to play through because there wasn't room to make a couple of the more difficult jumps. The hard skill point at the end of the underwater tunnel at the West of Blackblade Lake wasn't very hard at all with a constant flow of people making sure the Veteran mage who guards it rarely got to cast his devastating AEs.

Vet's dead, baby. Vet's dead.

It's not quite like it was at launch. MMOs only ever have that extreme, hysterical pitch when everyone levels together in the first few frenzied weeks or in the bubble that forms after the release of specific level-based content like a new race or an expansion with a raised level cap. Instead it's more the steady hum of like-minded players all choosing to be in a particular place for specific reasons of their own.

A lot of people are clearly bent on map completion. Map chat rings with questions about specific PoIs and vistas and how to get to them. There are also a heartening number of genuine new players, asking typical new-player questions like "does anyone need a 5-slot bag?" (answer: no, no-one in the entire world, not even if it is purple") and "what's Meatoberfest"? (answer: it's a Charr thing. You wouldn't understand. Maybe if you're a Norn...)

Warm beer, burnt meat, explosives - I think I was at that party in 1982

Against my normal run of play I, too, was Doing Map Completion. Partly because I want to try and gauge how the new changes play with what I take to be the normative new-player playstyle, which would be to finish a map before moving to the next, and partly because I might as well get in practice because Map Completion is one of the prime requirements for obtaining Traits through gameplay.

I have two things to say about Map Completion:

• The level ranges given on the maps in no way reflect the level required to complete them

•  Not only is Map Completion not exploring, it is the very antithesis of exploring

GW2 was never designed to allow a player to level steadily and sequentially through adjacent, level-appropriate maps. This was a major issue for many players at launch but players have learned or the culture has changed and you rarely hear complaints about it any more. Far from it. People seem much happier to level at the fastest conceivable pace by any means that comes to hand (crafting, Champ trains, Living Story, WvW) then come back and finish off the bits they missed (aka nearly everything) at a comfortable Level 80 with all the mis-scaled downlevel advantage that brings.

Who are you calling chicken?

At launch I was the one in map chat patiently (or not) explaining to some guy that GW2 wasn't "that sort of MMO", that you didn't have to finish a map before moving on, that it didn't matter that you had finished your racial starter map at level 10 but the map said it was supposed to go 15, that it was fine to go to another racial starting city and do their starter map too, that you could get xp doing almost anything - crafting, gathering, helping Blood Legion NPCs in full plate armor to stand up after a dandelion seed floating by on the breeze had knocked them unconscious. ..  That was then. Now I am that guy.

Truth be told, as a Charr I always had a problem with the whole set-up. It's bad enough that your Personal Story takes a dozen episodes teaching you the supreme importance of loyalty to your Warband and the Charr military-industrial complex, then cuts you loose from both as some kind of half-assed secret agent. The Personal Story is utter twaddle but at least it has some kind of narrative to cling on to, to explain why you're doing everything but what you imagine your character might actually want to do.

Yes, that's bad, but It's worse still if you decide to ignore it all and just run around doing whatever you like. So what am I now? A Gladium? A renegade? How come they don't arrest me for desertion the moment I set foot in Black Citadel? It's not like they don't know who I am - everyone I speak to calls me by my name and recaps my back-story.

You just ate meat from a guy who lives in a cave full of giant spiders. What did you think would happen?

So its hard enough staying in character just exploring Ascalon. I can just about rationalize it as some kind of rite of passage to discover my Charr heritage and I guess, at a push, I could stretch it to cover Getting To Know The Enemy in Kryta or Cultural Exchange in the Shiverpeaks but the further you stretch it the thinner it gets.

Which makes it a problem that so far I'm completing each map in about half to two-thirds of the supposed intended level range. And come to think of it, why does that happen, exactly? Because leveling in GW2 is about as difficult as eating a jam donut, that's why! And always has been.

I "finished" the level 15-25 Map Diessa Plateau last night by dinging 20 on Map Completion.

Well that's an hour of my life I'll never get back

I'd started it several hours earlier at exactly Level 15, wearing a complete set of Fine quality crafted armor that I'd made for myself at the forge in Black Citadel. I had 11 Fine quality crafted Weapons I'd made, one of every type a Guardian can use. Every piece had appropriate Runes and Sigils that I'd bought from Our Benevolent Benefactor Evon Gnashblade (if only they'd listened to him...) through the Black Lion Trading Post. I'd made food and sharpening stones. I'd spent well over an hour prepping.

First Heart out the gate took me about 2-3 minutes and the grateful vendor  offered me a major upgrade for my entire armor set. It went on like that from there. I literally didn't get more than two or three minutes' wear out of some items before the upgrade arrived. Moreover, within half an hour I was turning down the upgrades on offer for the content I was completing because I couldn't equip it for three or even five levels.

Clearly whoever designed the Heart flagged "Level 23" expected that the players completing it would be...level 23 or higher. That's why you need to be that level to wear the armor it rewards. I was soloing those at level 17 at a pleasantly satisfying challenge level. If other people happened by and joined in, as they often did, the challenge level dropped to somewhere between trivial and gimme now!

It would be tempting to blame this on the difficulty pass ANet gave the whole sub-80 world to compensate for the later arrival of Traits. That may have something to do with it but I wrote this after Beta Weekend Two, in which I observed "I moved to the level 15 - 25 areas when I dinged 13 and roamed around leveling up on mobs between 2 and four levels higher than me for most of Sunday." It might have gotten even easier but it was always easy.

Gotta get all that human blood off this armor somehow

Okay, some of it does come down to elder characters. A first character would be able to open all the Karma vendors, who in Diessa are stuffed to bursting with really good stuff - armor, weapons, jewellery, kits, many, many recipes - but wouldn't necessary have enough Karma to buy everything the way I did with 4.5m karma in the bank. It hardly matters, though, because having all that kit only makes things go extremely fast instead of just very fast.

Is this a bad thing? No, not as such. If this was my first character I very definitely would not have been pushing ahead at such a pace because I'd have been exploring. Yesterday I was doing Map Completion so I didn't explore at all. It sounds contradictory but it's really not.

Exploring is looking around you, paying attention to your surroundings, seeing something interesting or puzzling and going to investigate. It's spotting somewhere you think you just might be able to get to and taking a hour finding out you can't, but not minding because of the half a dozen fascinating things you found, trying.

Map Completion, conversely, is opening your map, checking where the next PoI or vista or waypoint is, running there using speed buffs, dodge rolls, stability or whatever you have that means you don't have to stop or engage with anything along the way, getting the UI flash that tells you you've ticked the box then barreling on to the next. All the time I was doing mine, other people were doing theirs, zipping past me, looping round and running back. No-one stopped for anything. I was about the only one who even bothered to watch the Camera Obscura at the vistas.

Vet's dead, baby...oh, you already heard that one?

Cut to the chase: did I have fun? Hell, yes. Thinking it through I come to the only conclusion I seem able to reach when GW2 comes under analysis: it is what it is. I loved Diessa Plateau in beta, when I was almost literally the only one there and I played it as though I was soloing in early Everquest. I loved it just after launch when there seemed to be hundreds on the map and nearly all of them Charr or Norn. I've loved it ever since, soloing it, duoing it, farming, exploring or just visiting favorite spots (the Cowtapult, the Sniper Rifles, the Meatoberfest fireworks, so many to choose from).

The Megaserver gives yet another face to Diessa, as does racing through it to complete the map. GW2 was built with an infrastructure where fun, and even the more elusive satisfaction, seem riveted on as firmly as the panels on the walkways of Black Citadel itself. It's gameplay that's very hard to break (although God knows sometimes it seems like ANet are doing their best to try) and I'm still not seeing anything in the recent revamp that looks like it could come close to breaking it for a new player. 

So, what comes next? At 25 there's an odd hiatus in the Charr leveling path. There is no Ascalonian map that covers 25-30 and the 30-40 map, Fields of Ruin has no safe entry point from lower levels, as I found out the hard way so I'd have to go via Divinity's Reach, which my Guardian doesn't want to do. I might do Map Completion in Wayfarers, something I'm not sure I've ever done despite having spent an inordinate amount of time there, or I might go to Lornar's Pass to evaluate the megaserver impact some more.

Whatever I choose fun is guaranteed.

Off The Map : GW2

World vs World may be addictive, thrilling, rah! rah! rah!. All of that. Mad King Pumpkinhead vs Crazy Prince Eddie may make for an amusing, if slightly tasteless, diversion. Swatting Tequaatl may get you a tiddly dragon and a title. Fine and dandy.

Don't see much of the world that way, though, do you?

I was flipping idly through the pages of my Achievement book, passing time waiting for something to happen, most likely Righteous Indignation to fade off some choleric camp Supervisor, when I happened to notice I was just a discovery or three away from notching up Explorer for Ascalon and Maguuma both.

Not being much the Achiever I didn't really know what that meant. I know about the map completion one that by now everyone but me has done. The one where you touch all the things marked on the map. I'm not much of a toucher for the sake of touching. My ranger, made on launch day and played more than anyone else on the team, sits at 58% on that one. None of the other eight come even that close. 

Map completion never struck me as exploring. More like box-ticking. Even the title it gives, "Been There, Done That", reeks of ennui. Ascalon Explorer, on the other hand, now that has a ring to it. And I love Ascalon. Always have. The thought that there might be some bits I hadn't seen came as quite the spur.

What makes an Explorer in Tyria? Turns out it's not hitting those same map completion markers after all. Started out doing that. Scoured my maps for dull dots. Went to light them up. Nothing. Waypoints, maybe? Nah, can't be. Already found all those ages ago.

In the end I had to look it up. To be an Explorer you have to visit all the places that sit on the map with their names in white letters and pop up once across the screen the first time you cross some invisible border. Anywhere still waiting to be found remains a blur on the map and there were two blurs right there in Blazeridge Steppes.

The first was way off to the Northeast, as far as you can travel; on the way to nowhere with no reason ever to go. I went. There's a cave filled with Secessionist rebels and a Charr outside offering her heart for help. A heart full of fondness for me, which is more than I could say in return. I didn't remember her at all.

I'd been here before, long ago, then, but it seems I didn't go deep enough. Exploring the cave over the cooling bodies of the dead, in a room far at the back I saw broken stairs that looked like you might climb them if you could only reach. Some clambering and leaping with that feline grace so emblematic of the Charr brought my head against the high ceiling and lo and behold a hole, invisible from the ground.


Through the hole, a hidden valley, home to wild boar. A grizzled old one did his best to gore me but I put him down, skinned him then took my pick to mine the rich node he'd been using for a scratching post. Save for the odd aggressive giant pig it was a truly idyllic spot. Verdant, lush, fed by its own clearwater stream and quiet. So quiet.

Did finding it make me an explorer? Yes...and no. It made me an actual, virtual explorer for sure. I'd poked around and scrabbled and found somewhere I never knew existed, that possibly most people who've ticked all the boxes have never seen, but it didn't increment the Ascalon Explorer counter. After all, there was only one white name in that corner of the map, Terra Carorunda, and I already had that from when I'd helped that Charr with her secessionist problem all those months ago.

Back to the map. Look! There's a fuzzy bit in Iron Marches to the West. A swift trip through the aether to an adjacent waypoint led to a disturbing discovery: The Infestation. Perhaps it's best to draw a veil over the descent through caves glowing weirdly with the sickly purple light of The Brand, the rubble-strewn floor thick with nests, the distorted chittering of countless corrupted devourers, the battle with that massive Branded Siege Devourer and, most terrifying of all, the huge and terrifying Branded Devourer Queen, skittering across the corpses of the Sentinels foolish enough to challenge her.

That was the place alright. No-one in their right mind would go in there and I hadn't either. Well now I had. One more discovery to go. Back to Blazeridge to gawp at the closed, barred gates of the Ogre stronghold Agrak Kraal. Will we ever see them opened or will they always keep their secrets close, like so many more?

All told, the whole adventure took not much more than an hour but chances are I'll remember it long after all the keep saves and candy runs are forgotten. There's a whole, wide world out there and I still haven't seen the half of it. Next stop, Maguuma.

This Land Is Our Land: GW2

Way back in April when we picked Yak's Bend as our server for the first Guild Wars 2 beta weekend, we didn't just pull a name out of a hat. Yak's Bend is where the world begins to open out in the original game, the point at which, after days of desperate struggle, hard-fought every yard through Charr hordes that never stop coming, at last you find a moment to catch your breath.

See this bend? This bend is mine.

Two abiding memories from the first run through the original Guild Wars are my complete shock on the fall of Ascalon and my immense sense of relief on reaching Yak's Bend. I played GW1 from launch but buying it was a late and somewhat spontaneous decision. I'd read little about it and had no foreknowledge of the plot. I loved pre-Searing Ascalon from the moment I arrived there and had no idea it would be snatched away from me so soon.

Come Guild Wars 2, I was always going to play a Charr. From the moment I realized, years after wading hip-deep through Charr blood with Prince Rurik, they were cats not demons as I'd thought, I was forced to re-evaluate and from that moment on there was no choice. Still, I didn't imagine I'd get what I'd always wanted; Ascalon back.

The orange is nice but I preferred it how you had it before

There are people, crazy people, who stay in pre-Searing Ascalon until they're fully grown. These are the Iron Men and Women of Guild Wars, ennobled with a title: Legendary Defender of Ascalon. Here's what they went through to earn that name. When players unfamiliar with the elder game question the design ethos behind GW2's Legendary Weapons, behavior like this is a factor they may not have taken into account.

Read it and weep, human.

I tried it once. I got to level 12 before I came to my senses. Life is quite literally too short. I gave up any hope of living in the eternal summer of pre-searing Ascalon. How ironic, then, that the door to that lost past should be re-opened by the same Charr who slammed it shut in my face all those years ago.

Go North-East from Lion's Arch and there, between the Shiverpeak and Blazeridge mountain ranges lies Ascalon. From Black Citadel, the great Charr capital built on the ruins of the human city of Rin, east through the Plains of Ashford to Blazeridge Steppes and north across the Diessa Plateau through the Iron Marches to Fireheart Rise, the Charr hold it all.

Being a cow doesn't give you a pass on training

Um, over here?

Every step is filled with wonder. The high summer idyll of the pre-Searing has ripened into an eternal Autumn, the fall after The Fall. The colors burnish with copper and gold, red poppies flag against the sunburned grasslands, white clouds mass the bluing sky. Ascalon is a land patched by farms, ribboned with ruins, haunted by ghosts figurative and literal. Its lakes are blue and deep, its caves dark and beckoning. There's treasure everywhere.

Out of these golden lands rise the cobalt holdings of the Charr. With all the dwarves gone Charr engineering stands unchallenged (quiet now, that Asura at the back...). Rather than scars or blisters, these massive edifices fit the land like giant puffballs, muted bluetones melding into the umber, soft curves blending into rolling hills, jagged edges natural as thornbriar.

This beautiful country has its dangers. Ghosts and devourers rise from the ground, bandits and revolutionaries bar the paths, ogres and harpies cleave to their own wild ways and may the gods that don't exist have mercy if you cross them. The Dredge, the Grawl, the Skritt pursue their own oblique agendas. Still, these are lands that can be explored with pleasure, if with care.

You can laugh now but in fifty years they'll be listed

Some must fight so all can live, as they say, but maybe not right now. Unlike Orr and the south, across Ascalon there is time to stop and take a look around between battles, to lie down in the long grass once in a while and rest.

Even the dragon, The Shatterer, had the good sense to set the mark of his Lordship on these lands with a scar instead, like Zhaitan, of flinging all to chaos. The Brand runs livid in the purples of a bruise across the back of Ascalon, but the Branded, unlike the Risen, keep to their rut.

Could have sworn I heard an Asura...

At the southern limit of the Charr's influence, Ascalon's, maybe Tyria's, loveliest city waits. Ebonhawke, thick-walled fortress with its wide streets going down to grass feels old as its honey stone. Saved the brash assertion of Rata Sum or the wild imagining of Lion's Arch, Ebonhawke stands more solid, evokes more empathy than either.

Does no-one in Ebonhawke own a scythe?

To the far North autumn gives way to winter as it must. Despite thick fur, Charr are cats and do not like the cold. The Norn may have the snow and welcome. As for the Baelfire, let the Flame Legion skulk among the cinders there, planning their plans. Few would envy them. No, the Charr fought for the heart of Ascalon, and now they have it, revel in it and will hold it long.

Had Guild Wars 2 been only Ascalon and only Charr I would have been more than satisfied. I am more than satisfied.